I think the central theme of my book is that the — you cannot understand the enormous Latino presence in the United States unless you understand America’s role in Latin America, and in fact that the Latino presence in the country is the harvest of the empire. It is the result of more than a century of domination of many of these countries. And in fact, those countries that were most dominated by the United States are the ones that have sent the most migrants to this country. And Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Salvador, Guatemala, these are the countries that have provided the bulk of the migration from Latin America, largely many of them fleeing from the civil wars, as in the cases of Guatemala and Nicaragua and El Salvador, in which the United States government played a key role in backing one side or the other, others coming here as a result of the needs of American businesses that established migration and recruiting, actually recruited people to come here to fill jobs — that’s more so in the case of the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans. And so, in essence, the migration flows, the mass migration flows of Latin Americans to this country were a direct response to the needs of the empire. Most Americans are not aware of that, because most Americans don’t even think of our
country as an empire. - Juan Gonzalez, from a DemocracyNow! interview.permalinkcomments

The interesting thing about this war, which really remade the world for the worse in every conceivable way — it killed some 20 million people, military and civilian; the way it ended guaranteed the rise of the Nazis and the second even more destructive war — was that in all of the countries involved, there were people who felt the war was madness and shouldn’t be fought. They didn’t prevail, unfortunately, but I nonetheless wanted to write their story, because it seemed to me that when we usually write about wars, we describe them as a contest between one side and the other, whereas I was more interested in this conflict between people who saw the war as a noble and necessary crusade and people who saw it as madness.

I focused on England, because that’s where this antiwar movement was strongest. More than 20,000 British men of military age refused to go into the army when they were drafted. Many of them, as a matter of principle, refused the alternative service offered to conscientious objectors, like driving ambulances at the front or, you know, working in war industries. More than 6,000 went to prison, under very harsh conditions — the largest number of people who had been imprisoned, up to that point in time, for political reasons in a Western democracy. And they were a remarkable group of people. And happily, for me as a writer, they wrote letters. They kept diaries. They published clandestine prison newspapers. And they had interesting relationships with friends and family members who felt differently about the war and, in some cases,
were at the front fighting. - Adam Hochschild, from a DemocracyNow! interview.permalinkcomments

African American historian Manning Marable passed away on Friday, April 1 at the age of 60, just days before the publication of his life’s work, a monumental biography about Malcolm X. Two decades in the making, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention is described as a reevaluation of Malcolm X’s life which provides new insights into the circumstances of his assassination, as well as raising questions about his autobiography. Manning Marable has been one of the few historians who has had access to the three missing chapters from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" that he says paint a very different picture than the book with Alex Haley and Spike Lee’s film. Marable has also had unprecedented access to Malcolm’s family and documents that shed new light on the involvement of the New York Police, the FBI and possibly
the CIA in Malcolm X’s assassination.

Manning Marable on Malcolm X:

I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by Black America in the 20th century. That’s a heavy statement, but I think that in his 39 short years of life, Malcolm came to symbolize Black urban America, its culture, its politics, its militancy, its outrage against structural racism and at the end of his life, a broad internationalist vision of emancipatory power far better than any other single individual that he shared with DuBois and Paul Robeson, a pan-Africanist internationalist perspective. He shared with Marcus Garvey a commitment to building strong black institutions. He shared with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a commitment to peace and the freedom of racialized minorities. He was the first prominent American to attack and to criticize the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, and he came out four-square against the Vietnam War in 1964, long before the vast majority of Americans did. So that Malcolm X represents the cutting edge of a kind of critique of globalization in the 21st century. In fact, Malcolm, if anything, was far ahead of the curve in so many ways. - an excerpt from a 2005 DemocracyNow! interview.
See also Democracy Now!'s Complete Interviews with Manning Marable.permalinkcomments

By an historical coincidence, both Julian Assange and Luis Posada Carriles were brought before Western courts around the same time in late 2010 and early 2011—Assange in Britain and Posada in the United States. The contrast in their treatment by the U.S.-Anglo system of justice and in their handling by the Western establishment media is enlightening.

Posada, now 82, is a self-confessed terrorist, Bay of Pigs veteran, School of the Americas graduate, and CIA operative who has been credibly placed at two meetings where the plan was hatched for the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 civilians aboard. He also has been implicated in numerous other terrorist acts in which people were killed or injured and property destroyed, and he played a role in the United States' arms-smuggling network in Central America that eventually came to light in the Iran-Contra investigations.

"The CIA taught us everything," Posada told the New York Times in 1998. "They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in acts of sabotage." Posada was a star pupil. But as a longtime CIA asset and, until the past decade, the "most notorious commando in the anti-Castro underground," the U.S. justice system has never charged Posada with a crime related to terrorism or the death of civilians, even though a former FBI counterterrorism expert who investigated the Cuban airliner bombing claims that Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in its planning. Surely this is because his killings and bombings were carried out against targets of U.S. policy, and because he almost certainly would have implicated the CIA.

In fact, the U.S. justice system never charged Posada with any kind of offense until early 2007, when a federal grand jury indicted him with the ludicrously lesser charges of making false statements during his naturalization interview two years earlier. After Posada had slipped into Miami's anti-Castro Cuban-exile community in March 2005, he filed for political asylum but then quickly withdrew his application when he recognized that in the aftermath of 9/11 and Bush's "War on Terror," his past activities made him a "hot potato."

But before he could disappear again, he held a news conference in Miami, and Department of Homeland Security agents grabbed him—and ever since he has faced a series of on-again-off-again perjury charges related to his original interview.

With his current trial now underway in a U.S. District Court in El Paso, things have not moved beyond this point, leading one observer, Jose Pertierra, a Washington D.C.-based attorney who represents the Venezuelan government, which since 2005 has sought Posada's extradition to stand trial for the Cuban airliner bombing, to conclude that "all parties are waiting for a biological solution to this case.”

As U.S. prosecutor Timothy Reardon told the court at the start of this trial, Posada "can do anything he wants to the Cuban regime." But he lied during his naturalization interview, and one "must play by the rules and tell the truth to become a citizen."

Julian Assange, by contrast, has not killed anybody, or so far even broken any law, and key U.S. military officials have denied claims that information released into the public realm via WikiLeaks has resulted in anybody's death...

Bob Dylan, or at least the idea of him, is the lurking, mocking background chorus in this beautiful, bittersweet look at postwar America's foremost agitprop singer/songwriter. For all that Phil Ochs could have achieved in his lauded but still overshadowed career, there stands Dylan, the one who came up through the same West Village coffeehouse folk scene but who had no problem jettisoning its politics once he realized that greater commercial reward was there for the taking without the encumbrance of protest. As Christopher Hitchens points out in the film, there was a difference between those who liked Dylan and those who even knew about Ochs -- anybody could be into Dylan, Ochs's songs were for those who cared.

Van Dyke Parks: The thing about Phil that made him interesting was he was totally unequivocal. He was determined, precise, literate, but already filled with rage and political purpose in his songs.

Phil Ochs: [singing] He slowly squeezed the trigger, the bullet left his side. It struck the heart of every man when Evers fell and died. Too many martyrs and too many dead...

Dave Van Ronk: Topical song movement evolved out of opposition to segregation, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement, in general, subsequently the Vietnam War. Without those howling injustices and outrages, there would have been no protest song movement. Probably there would have been no folk song movement.

Phil Ochs: [singing] And then there came the boycotts and then the Freedom Rides. And forgetting what you stood for, you tried to block the tide. Oh, the automation bosses were laughing on the side, as they watched you lose your link on the chain, on the chain, as they watched you lose your link on the chain.

Michael Ochs: Phil would play anywhere. There were the club things. There’d be a multi-artist thing. You’d hear about all these causes that needed help. He would go to the South and do civil rights things.

Phil Ochs: [singing] If you drag her muddy rivers, nameless bodies you will find. Oh, the calendar is lying when it reads the present time. Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of. Mississippi, find yourself another country to be part of.

Michael Ochs: It was a great way to reach people through one’s music. Phil would actually turn down a commercial job for a benefit, because the benefit would usually reach more people.

Abbie Hoffman: No matter how small a group or big the group, whenever anybody asked, I can never remember him turning down anybody, any benefit, any chance to sing for a cause he believed in. He really—Phil Ochs was there.

Lucian Truscot IV: Those guys were true believers. Those guys would show up, you know, for the opening of an envelope to give $10 to some guy that was handing out crackers on the Bowery, to sing a song for the cracker-hander-outter guy.

Arthur Gorson: Phil went down to Hazard, Kentucky, because there was a miners’ strike.

Phil Ochs: [singing] Well, some people think that unions are too strong, union leaders should go back where they belong.

Arthur Gorson: We got to sleep in bathtubs, so that when they came and shot up the rooms at night, you wouldn’t have bullets bouncing off. And it was cool.

Phil Ochs: [singing] Well, mining is a hazard in Hazard, Kentucky, and if you ain’t mining there, you’re awful lucky, because if you don’t get silicosis or a pay that’s just atrocious, you’ll be screaming for a union that will care.

Arthur Gorson: There was sort of a very kind of practical moral politics that had to do with a sincere feeling that people should be treated equally.

Phil Ochs: [singing] But if you want to get together and fight, good buddy, that’s what I want to hear.

There are people whose memory fades with time. There are others whose importance only grows. Such a man was Chalmers Johnson
, who died last week. As a CIA analyst, and an influential scholar of east Asia's political economy, he forced a revision both of the Chinese revolution and the Japanese "economic miracle". Johnson went from being a spear-carrier for US global power to an unflinching chronicler of its impending demise. It started with a visit to Okinawa, where a 12-year-old Japanese girl was abducted and raped by two US marines and a sailor in 1995. He found that local hostility to the US military was not the exception, a response to three "bad apples", but the rule. Only late in his career did his impact reach beyond academia, with a trilogy that pathologised America's current role in the world. Blowback, the CIA word for the unintended consequences of actions that are kept secret from the US public, was the first: it was ignored at home when it came out in 2000. Its prime example was the recruiting, arming and putting into combat of mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s. 11 September made this book a bestseller, while "blowback" entered the political vocabulary. With 700 declared military bases, and probably 300 secret ones, around the world, Johnson likened his country to the Roman republic as it turned into an empire, which would find itself overstretched, bankrupted and then overrun. The uncomfortable parallel may have some life in it yet. - from In praise of … Chalmers Johnson.

Chalmers Johnson on his "Blowback" trilogy:

In Blowback, I set out to explain why we are hated around the world. The concept "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to and in foreign countries. It refers to retaliation for the numerous illegal operations we have carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. This means that when the retaliation comes -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is unable to put the events in context. So they tend to support acts intended to lash out against the perpetrators, thereby most commonly preparing the ground for yet another cycle of blowback. In the first book in this trilogy, I tried to provide some of the historical background for understanding the dilemmas we as a nation confront today, although I focused more on Asia -- the area of my academic training -- than on the Middle East."

The Sorrows of Empire was written during the American preparations for and launching of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. I began to study our continuous military buildup since World War II and the 737 military bases we currently maintain in other people's countries. This empire of bases is the concrete manifestation of our global hegemony, and many of the blowback-inducing wars we have conducted had as their true purpose the sustaining and expanding of this network. We do not think of these overseas deployments as a form of empire; in fact, most Americans do not give them any thought at all until something truly shocking, such as the treatment of prisoners as Guantanamo Bay, brings them to our attention. But the people living next door to these bases and dealing with the swaggering soldiers who brawl and sometimes rape their women certainly think of them as imperial enclaves, just as the people of ancient Iberia or nineteenth-century India knew that they were victims of foreign colonization."

In Nemesis, I have tried to present historical, political, economic, and philosophical evidence of where our current behavior is likely to lead. Specifically, I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship or its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, military Keynesianism, and ruinous military expenses have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

"Examining Tuskegee" seeks to reaffirm the importance of medical ethics and informed consent. Unlike previous studies on Tuskegee, Reverby's
"Examining Tuskegee" highlights the usual black-and-white tale of ethics and deception by documenting the personal stories of surviving victims.
"I was terrified that I wouldn't understand the heavy southern accent and I was more worried that they wouldn't understand my New York accent," Reverby said of her first interactions with former Tuskegee subjects. She traveled to Macon County, Ala. to interview the men directly.
Reverby was not solely concerned with making her findings on Tuskegee known to the government. She spoke to the families of the victims to help them understand the injustice of the syphilis study.

"The scariest thing was speaking at a Southern Baptist church," she recalled. It was in that Baptist Church that she discussed the syphilis study before an audience of approximately one hundred individuals in Notasulga, Ala., just outside of Tuskegee. "About a quarter were family members of the study," Reverby recalled. She had to face down the community's suspicious comments: "‘Why should we believe you? Are you here just to use us one more time?'"

To acknowledge Reverby's efforts in documenting and publishing details on the Tuskegee experiments, Macon County declared a "Susan Reverby Day." "This was a high point in my intellectual career," said Reverby, who was overwhelmed by the response of Macon County and the warmth extended to her.
Although Reverby acknowledged the personal importance of the reaction to her efforts from the local communities, she is even more appreciative of the impact she has had on the academic community. Her work has had a lasting impact on more than twenty historians, a fact that is deeply meaningful to her. - from The Wellesley News

"He who knows syphilis, knows medicine," famed early twentieth-century John Hopkins physician Sir William Osler is often quoted as saying. The contemporary adage would be different: "Those who know 'Tuskegee' know racism in medicine and injustice." Yet these simple maxims belie their connected longer versions and not-so-simple truths. A twentieth-century medical research study of African American men with sexually transmitted disease of syphilis, in which the hundreds involved did not know that treatment was supposedly withheld, has led to many stories where conceptions of race, uncertainties in medicine, mistrust of doctors, and the power of the state intertwine. This book is about what made the study possible, why it continued, and the histories and stories told after it ended. It unravels the political and cultural purposes served when a complicated experience has many narratives, but the tale is told simply as a straightforward allegory for all time about racism, medicine and mistrust. - from Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy by Susan Reverby.

Benoît Mandelbrot has had his name applied to a feature of mathematics that has become part of everyday life, the Mandelbrot set. Beginning in the 1960s, Mandelbrot realized that many real-world phenomena in different branches of science display similar patterns that recur at smaller and smaller scales. These included clouds, snowflakes, coastlines, stock-market fluctuations, brain tissue, music, lingusistics and other phenomena. Mandelbrot modeled these phenomena with objects that he called "fractals." The name refers to a property called fractional dimensionality: fractals are fuzzier than a line but never quite fill a plane. The best known fractal is the Mandelbrot set. It is generated by repeatedly solving a mathematical function and plugging the answer back into it. Popular accounts of chaos theory sometimes present the Mandelbrot set and fractal geometry as a story of indeterminism. Actually, however, it is a story of how simple deterministic relations can produce extraordinarily complex results.

Benoît Mandelbrot died on October 14 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 85. On hearing of his death, mathematician Heinz-Otto Peitgen said "if we talk about impact inside mathematics, and applications in the sciences, he is one of the most important figures of the last 50 years."
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Mandelbrot had "a powerful, original mind that never shied away from innovating and shattering preconceived notions...His work, developed entirely outside mainstream research, led to modern information theory."
permalinkcomments

Mohammed Arkoun, one of the most prominent and original scholars in the field of Islamic Studies, died last month at the age of 82.

An aspect of modern Muslim countries that Arkoun constantly drew attention to was the crisis of education. Instead of becoming a means of learning and liberation from superstition, education has become, in most Muslim countries, a means of spreading what he described as "institutionalised ignorance". The spread of such education went hand in hand with the rise of Islamist discourse, even in countries where Islamists are not in power.

Arkoun saw his project as one that goes beyond the confines of the field of Islamic studies. He believed in a critical approach that was also self-critical and hence aware of its own limits. As such, the critical approach becomes a process. Such work is also of a comparative nature – one cannot study Islam outside its monotheistic context and in isolation from Judaism and Christianity. He believed that if scholars in Muslim countries adopted such an approach in practising Islamic studies, they would not only liberate their discipline, but also themselves and, in the process, help liberate their societies.
- from the Guardian obituary.

As he began to consider how one might rethink Islam in the contemporary world, his sophisticated questioning provided a welcome counterpoint to the highly ideological interpretations that dominated debate in both the Muslim world and the non-Muslim West. - from the Institute of Ismaili Studies obituary.

In the final years of his career, Arkoun repeatedly expressed regret that his methodological suggestions often fell on deaf ears among scholars of Islam. But that did not deter him the least. In fact, in the last ten years or so, he actually expanded his horizons from the study of Islamic thought to a critique of all forms of reason and rational thinking, proposing an almost Kantian philosophical recalibration, which he called the 'Emerging Reason Project' and continued to advocate and propagate until the very end. - from Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010): Trailblazer for new approaches to the study of Islam by Carool Kersten.permalinkcomments

Born in 1936 in Arequipaog, Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa has for years been Peru's most acclaimed writer. In the late 1980s he also gained a reputation as a right-wing maverick when he led a mass movement against a decision to nationalize the country''s banks and later ran for the presidency in 1990 as a free market conservative. "His political position stains his literature" were the words of Argentine writer Luisa Valenzuela. The Nobel Prize committee obviously disagreed and cited Mario Vargas Llosa "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat". A complex figure, we quote Vargas Llosa from a 2002 interview about his latest book at that time, The Feast of the Goat:

What was the inspiration for The Feast of the Goat?

In 1975, I went to the Dominican Republic for eight months during the shooting of a film based on my novel Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. It was during this period I heard and read about Trujillo. I had the idea of a novel set with this historical background. It's a long project. I went many times to the Dominican Republic to read the papers, and also to interview many people: victims, neutral people and collaborators of Trujillo.

To what degree is the book really about Alberto Fujimori?

Well, I think it's a book about Trujillo, but if you write about a dictator you are writing about all dictators, and about totalitarianism. I was writing not only about Trujillo but about an emblematic figure and something that has been experienced in many other societies.

Particularly in Latin America.

When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities. He pushed to the extreme trends which were quite common to most dictators of the time.

The corruption of power.

Dictators are not natural catastrophes. That's something I wanted to describe: how dictators are made with the collaboration of many people, and sometimes even with the collaboration of their victims.

Do you have insights into dictatorship from your political experience?

My three years in politics was very instructive about the way in which the appetite for political power can destroy a human mind, destroy principles and values and transform people into little monsters.

This novel is written partly from a woman's point of view. Was that a problem?

A challenge, not a problem. I wanted a woman to be one of the protagonists, because I think women were the worst victims of Trujillo. To his authoritarianism you have to add machismo. Trujillo used sex not only for pleasure but also as an instrument of power. And in this he went far further than many, many other dictators. He went to bed, for example, with the wives of his collaborators.

Like a Shakespeare play.

In a way. Coriolanus is a fantastic play about this subject.
- from an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa conducted by Robert McCrum and published in The Observer in 2002.

1 Urania. Her parents had done her no favor; her name suggested a planet, a mineral, anything but the slender, fine-featured woman with burnished skin and large, dark, rather sad eyes who looked back at her from the mirror. Urania! What an idea for a name. Fortunately nobody called her that anymore; now it was Uri, Miss Cabral, Ms. Cabral, Dr. Cabral. As far as she could remember, after she left Santo Domingo (or Ciudad Trujillo -- when she left they had not yet restored the old name to the capital city), no one in Adrian, or Boston, or Washington, D.C., or New York had called her Urania as they did at home and at the Santo Domingo Academy, where the sisters and her classmates pronounced with absolute correctness the ridiculous name inflicted on her at birth. Was it his idea or hers? Too late to find out, my girl; your mother was in heaven and your father condemned to a living death. You'll never know. Urania! As absurd as insulting old Santo Domingo de Guzman by calling it Ciudad Trujillo. Could that have been her father's idea too?

She waits for the sea to become visible through the window of her room on the ninth floor of the Hotel Jaragua, and at last she sees it. The darkness fades in a few seconds and the brilliant blue of the horizon quickly intensifies, beginning the spectacle she has been anticipating since she woke at four in spite of the pill she had taken, breaking her rule against sedatives. The dark blue surface of the ocean, marked by streaks of foam, extends to a leaden sky at the remote line of the horizon, while here, at the shore, it breaks in resounding, whitecapped waves against the Sea Walk, the Malecón, where she can make out sections of the broad road through the palms and almond trees that line it. Back then, the Hotel Jaragua faced the Malecón directly. Now it's to the side. Her memory brings back the image -- was that the day? -- of the little girl holding her father's hand as they entered the hotel restaurant so the two of them could have lunch together. They were given a table next to the window, and through the sheer lace curtains Urania could see the spacious garden and the pool with its diving boards and swimmers. In the Patio Espanol, surrounded by glazed tiles and flowerpots filled with carnations, an orchestra was playing merengues. Was that the day? "No" she says aloud. The Jaragua of those days had been torn down and replaced by this massive shocking-pink structure that had surprised her so much when she arrived in Santo Domingo three days ago.

Were you right to come back? You'll be sorry, Urania. Wasting a week's vacation, when you never had time to visit all the cities, regions, countries you would have liked to see -- the mountain ranges and snow-covered lakes of Alaska, for instance -- returning to the island you swore you'd never set foot on again. A symptom of decline? The sentimentality of age? Curiosity, nothing more. To prove to yourself you can walk along the streets of this city that is no longer yours, travel through this foreign country and not have it provoke sadness, nostalgia, hatred, bitterness, rage in you. Or have you come to confront the ruin of your father? To learn what effect seeing him has on you, after so many years. A shudder runs the length of her body. Urania, Urania! What if after all these years you discover that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid, wounded, sentimental heart?
- an excerpt from The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosapermalinkcomments